I chose a recipe more or less at random and changed it to suit my own tastes and accommodate the ingredients I had on hand. Fortunately, I had a block of feta and our garden is just starting to produce a few cherry tomatoes, although I did have to supplement them with tomatoes from the grocery store. I also had fresh basil, garlic, onions and olive oil. Some recipes also call for cream cheese, shallots, lemon zest, red pepper flakes, thyme and other herbs or spinach. Those things all sound great, but I wanted to make this as simple as possible (which is how I think it will taste best).
Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Put two pints of cherry tomatoes into a large ovenproof dish. You don’t even need to slice them — just keep them whole. Add half a large onion, cut into 1/2-inch chunks. Next, add eight to 10 peeled and crushed cloves of garlic. (I tried flattening them with the blade of my knife but ended up sort of hammering them with the knife handle. Whatever works.) Mix everything with ¼ cup olive oil, ¼ cup chopped fresh basil (it might seem like a lot but basil is fluffy), ½ teaspoon lemon pepper, two dashes of nutmeg and ¼ to ½ teaspoon salt. A note on the salt: I included extra salt because tomatoes are notorious salt hogs and can absorb a lot before reaching optimum taste. However, feta is also salty, although the amount of salt varies by brand. The upshot is you’ll want to use the salt measurement as a suggestion rather than a rule.
Put an 8-ounce block of feta directly in the middle of the tomatoes, working it around until the tomatoes are cuddled around the cheese all cozy-like. The internet recommends feta made with sheep’s milk or mostly sheep’s milk because it melts better. If the cheese comes in brine, add that, too (but be mindful of the salt content). Drizzle a little extra olive oil over the feta. Put everything in the oven and bake for 45 minutes.
About 20 or 25 minutes into the process, start boiling salted water for pasta. Many TikTok pasta recipes neglect to mention exactly how much pasta you should cook to go with the sauce, which is kind of important, but maybe I’m overthinking it. I cooked a 16-ounce box of penne rigate (penne with little ridges to hold the sauce) and only used about three-quarters of it, but extra pasta is never a problem here because my daughter will eat it. She would be quite happy to go to sleep on a bed of noodles, if such a thing existed, and it’s a genuine shame that it doesn’t. Anyhow, cook the pasta until it’s al dente, which means it should just offer a little resistance when you bite into it. Drain the pasta but reserve ¼ cup pasta water.
When the tomatoes and feta are done — the tomatoes should have burst or become soft and wrinkled, and the feta cheese should be a toasty golden color on top — remove them from the oven. Stir the melted feta together with the tomatoes and then add the pasta along with ¼ cup pasta water. The starch in the pasta water will make a silkier sauce and help it stick to the penne. Mix until the pasta is well coated and serve with a sprinkling of fresh basil leaves. So!
